Hoi, When it is painful that things are not available in Wikipedia because we do not allow for fair use, it will stimulate the debate about the way copyright is an offence to bringing information and science to the people. By using fair use pictures you allow the status quo to maintain it self. The dearth of material about certain subjects makes them even less relevant. For the parties like the RIAA it is important to realise that without the availability of material like this, many of their artists will only be forgotten that much quicker. Not that they are likely to care because there is always the next boy band or girlie group to hype. Thanks, GerardM
Delirium schreef:
teun spaans wrote:
So the question is: what do we pursue: the dream of a free content, or a compromise which add some chrome/culture but inhibits the free spreading of knowledge?
I'm not sure it really inhibits the free spread of knowledge in that case, since a reuser who prefers not to or can't rely on fair use can always distribute the same article with the fair-use pictures removed---this can even be done automatically since we tag them as fair use. What *would* inhibit free knowledge in this case is if we used a fair-use picture where a free one was available, since in that case we'd be forcing this kind of user to remove a picture when we could've provided one that they could have kept in.
But if it's a choice between providing no picture at all, and providing a picture that some large subset of users (but not all) can use while the rest can automatically remove it, I don't see why it *hurts* free knowledge to provide the optional image rather than none.
-Mark